


Error State

by Philomytha



Category: Vorkosigan Saga - Lois McMaster Bujold
Genre: Betrayal, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-16
Updated: 2019-10-16
Packaged: 2020-12-31 01:56:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,602
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21042092
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Philomytha/pseuds/Philomytha
Summary: When Illyan begins to suspect something is going wrong with his memory chip, he follows proper procedure and notifies his second-in-command.





	Error State

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by [a discussion on tumblr](https://rainaramsay.tumblr.com/post/186780462780/spoilers-for-memory-from-the-vorkosigan-saga-by) about whether Illyan was concealing a medical problem just like Miles did.

Captain Illyan stared at the memo on his display. It was evidence. Evidence of something, some error, if only he knew what. He turned, letting his eyes rest unfocussed on the empty space of the wall, his whole attention inside his head. The memory of writing it and sending it off was perfectly clear, and it was a memory from five months ago. He had the date, the time, the very second. He called up confirmation on his console: he had sent this memo five months ago, the copy was in the correct place in his console's archive. He had never checked the console's archive before. He had never needed to check it before. 

But the memory of two minutes ago was clear too: Captain Galeni calling him up to query the memo which he had just received. Could it be an error with the ImpSec console network? Was it randomly re-sending past messages? Was Galeni mistaken? 

It only took him a minute to prove this simple, hopeful explanation false. His console informed him he had typed and sent the message again five minutes ago. He had no memory of doing it, not on his chip, not five minutes ago. Only the memory from five months ago. Off the chip, he knew he had recently typed up several memos and sent them, but the chip told him he'd done three others, and they had all been correct. And then, apparently without his chip recording it, he had typed out a message verbatim from five months ago and sent that too. 

None of this made sense. He hadn't been paying a great deal of attention to the memos, it was true. And he hadn't slept well last night, his dreams haunted with warped replays of his interview with Miles. Perhaps he'd just cross-correlated wrongly, and the chip had redumped the old message in his head--but there were no special correlations between the message he'd sent Captain Galeni and the others, and that didn't explain the gap in his memory. 

Which left the other possibility. A glitch on his chip. Grimly, Illyan checked his schedule, then contacted his secretary. "Hold all incoming calls for the next hour, please." 

The auto-diagnostic suite on the chip was not pleasant, and Illyan rarely used it. The human body interpreted errors as pain, and when the chip dumped its list of recent malfunctions in his awareness, it came with nausea and a stabbing headache. He had learned to take painkillers first, but it didn't help as much as he would have liked. Nonetheless, he had to go through the list item by item, separating out the tiny random errors from anything more serious. 

At the end of the hour, he was no wiser, and more worried, the nausea he felt not entirely the result of the auto-diagnostic. There had been more tiny random errors than usual, up by 4.3% on the last time he'd run this, but since he ran it infrequently, he couldn't be sure it was anything other than bad luck. The odder result was the complete absence of serious errors. He usually had one or two, and he was certain that something had gone wrong earlier, but it wasn't being reported. If there was a problem with the chip's own self-correction processes... he rested his head on his hands, eyes closed. The chip seemed to be running as smoothly as it ever did, bar the headache. But there was something wrong, something strange, he knew that too. There wasn't a major crisis on, barring the Imperial Betrothal and Miles's disaster, and he had no explanation for why he'd felt strained and anxious and unhappy for the past weeks. Something was wrong. 

Illyan got up and paced across his office and back again, though each step jarred his aching head. If something was going wrong inside his head, he needed an outside opinion. Someone he could trust absolutely, whose judgement was needle-sharp and who knew the chip didn't make him infallible. He reached for his comm, feeling lighter already. 

His chip, working properly now, sandbagged him with the knowledge that Lady Alys had left for Komarr four days ago and was out of immediate comm range. He could send her a message, but her reply wouldn't reach him for days, and he needed a conversation, not a correspondence. He sat down again. 

Negri had once written a lengthy file of procedures for if his chip malfunctioned. Illyan had found the file when he'd taken command of ImpSec, procedures for if he went catatonic, if he started replaying memories unprompted, if he started to forget things, every possible malfunction in Emperor Ezar's vid recorder and what to do about it. For all but the mildest issues, Negri's solution involved a nerve disruptor to the skull followed by rapid cremation to destroy any remaining evidence. Illyan had destroyed the file, but no file he had seen was ever destroyed. That was the problem, and as Chief of ImpSec it was a problem he couldn't overlook. 

So, after long consultation with Aral, he'd written his own set of procedures. These mostly, at Aral's insistence, ended with surgical removal and cremation of the chip, with his ultimate fate resting in his lord's hands. But Aral was retired and on Sergyar now, even harder to reach than Alys, and by the time Gregor had taken power, his chip had been so well-behaved for so long that he had almost stopped worrying about whether it might ever malfunction. The only problems he did have were all problems with his own normal human body and brain, never the chip. Gregor had seen the files once, but had never commented on them, and Illyan had never discussed the intricacies of his chip with his Emperor. 

But this was not a normal problem, when he couldn't keep up with the chip's relentless torrent of data, when he couldn't process or filter its information quickly or fluently enough, when he couldn't control its output. This was a different kind of problem altogether, a problem of totally incorrect data being supplied and then not recorded. This was new. 

_I'd have mistrusted my memory chip before I mistrusted you_, he had told Miles. First Miles had betrayed him, and now his chip was betraying him. Illyan covered his face with his hands and sat like that for a long time, for ninety seconds according to the chip, then sat up again. 

He had fired Miles; if necessary he would have to put his memory chip to fire as well. And the first item on all of his own procedures had been to notify his second-in-command of a possible problem. He contacted his secretary again. "Send me General Haroche, please. Priority three." Priority three meant he could finish what he was doing first. Priority two was to abandon what he was doing. Priority one, which Illyan tried to avoid using, was to abandon what he was doing and run. He sincerely hoped that a glitch in his chip would never give rise to a priority one order. 

It was only six minutes before Haroche knocked on the inner door of his office.

"Enter," Illyan called. 

Haroche looked uneasy as he came in. Illyan braced himself to plunge straight into the subject. If he'd been able to have this conversation with Lady Alys, he could have worked up to it gently, waited until he was comfortable before discussing such a harrowing problem with her. But Haroche was obviously worried about why he'd been unexpectedly summoned, it would be cruel to make him wait. And the chip had given him a thirty-year masterclass in detachment. 

"Take a seat," Illyan went on, and Haroche obeyed. "Captain Galeni has brought something worrying to my attention and I need your input on it."

"Of course, sir," said Haroche, but his eyes were still wary, waiting for something. He'd seemed slightly on edge for the past weeks too, according to the chip's dispassionate analysis. Nobody liked it when a rising star like Miles fell so hard. 

"An hour and a half ago," Illyan said, knowing his voice was exactly as bland and level as it always was, "I sent a memo addressed to Captain Raoul regarding the status of Vernante Fleet's agents before their departure. Naturally, it went to Captain Galeni, who very properly sent it back to me to query. I found I had no memory of sending it, though it was recorded on my console as if I had. It's not a comconsole error or anything like that. I did send that precise memo five months ago, and then, apparently without knowing it, I wrote it and sent it again just now. I am deeply concerned about what this means for the possibility of a error of some sort in my biochip."

Haroche stiffened in alarm. "In your--I didn't think that was even possible, sir." 

"There are two major possibilities, and further complications flow out of each of them," Illyan went on. This was the advantage of discussing this with Haroche rather than Lady Alys: he didn't have to make it personal. He could focus solely on his work, on the smooth functioning of ImpSec, of the security of the Empire. Nothing else would worry Haroche. "The first possibility is that it was a natural error, whether random or part of senescence or illness or anything of that nature. The second is that it could be some kind of subtle attack. I don't know of any attack mechanism that could cause this particular issue, but it is not a possibility we could omit. If the former, it could worsen unpredictably; if the latter it could be part of a broader attack on the functioning of ImpSec. Either way there could be serious implications, and you need to be aware of it all." 

"You've only noticed this one mistake?" Haroche said. "No others?"

"I'm not aware of any. But I wasn't aware of this until Captain Galeni brought it to my attention." And that was an ugly thought. Could this be much worse than it looked? The self-test hadn't revealed this error, it might have omitted others too. Had he been leaving an invisible trail of chaos in his wake for weeks? 

"If there were other mistakes, other people would have noticed them," Haroche said, his voice steady and reassuring. Astute man, Haroche. Illyan felt himself being handled, but could not bring himself to object. An outside opinion was what he'd wanted, and if that outside opinion was calmer, perhaps his own fears were running ahead of his evidence. "I think you can rest easy on that front. ImpSec has its own self-checking systems, and they are working well. Nobody's brought anything of this nature to my attention." He sat back in his chair. "Have you discussed this with anyone else, sir?" 

Illyan gave the faintest of smiles. "You are top of my need-to-know list. I have only just begun to think through the possibilities myself." 

"Ah. Good. That's good. In--in either of your two potential scenarios, anything that spreads mistrust of you, of ImpSec, could be extremely damaging. If it is an attack, it would play into their hands." 

"True." 

"But, with respect, sir, I think you may be extrapolating a lot here. One mistaken memo to either a major health problem or a full-scale attack on ImpSec--it's a big step." 

"If it is a problem, and it can be fixed, I have a duty to tackle it at once." _Oh, Miles. This is harder than I thought it would be._ "Now, even my personal physician has only limited knowledge of the internal functionings of my chip, but with a full neuro workup, scans, tests, if there is anything detectable, anything at all in my system that might be causing this problem, perhaps it can be found at once and fixed." He rubbed his eyes and stared at the wall blankly for a moment, aware of just how unlikely it was that the doctors could sort this out. Of how little he wanted to turn his head over to the doctors. If it was a medical problem at all. If it wasn't just a blip, as Haroche seemed to think. 

Haroche was waiting patiently for him to continue. "Sorry, I have a bit of a headache," he went on. "But I wanted to make you aware of this immediately. If--if my judgement is impaired, I need someone I can trust here now." 

Haroche was silent for a moment. Then he said gently, "Sir, I really think you're overreacting. You're tired, you have a headache, you made a mistake. You don't need to spend a week in the infirmary because of it. I know you're not used to making mistakes--God knows we all know that here--" he gave a chuckle which Illyan unwillingly joined him in --"but this looks exactly like a normal mistake to me. Clock off early today, get a good night's sleep. If you still notice problems in the morning, then we can escalate." 

Illyan tried to weigh this advice impartially. He'd chosen Haroche as his second because the man had no hesitation about disagreeing with him. And Haroche's judgement was unusually good. He was right about one thing: Illyan had no concept of normal mistakes. There was perfection, or close enough to perfection that nobody without a memory chip could tell the difference, and there was everything else. He had calculated a standard error rate for his colleagues once he'd been given the chip, and had several sliding scales for his subordinates now, and a scale all his own for Miles. Haroche's error rate was measurably lower than most of his other subordinates. One mistaken memo, if Haroche was right and this was his only error, was not a significant rate of mistakes over thirty years. Perhaps he was jumping at shadows. He'd learned not to jump at shadows in the world outside, in thousands upon thousands of occurrences across the Empire that could be honest mistakes or coincidences or just possibly a brutal coup in the making. But he wasn't used to having shadows inside his own head. 

But he wasn't prepared to ignore this altogether. One mistake after thirty years of no mistakes was a change in a pattern. "Mm. It's possible. But protecting ImpSec is the most important thing. I can't run the risk of sending inappropriate orders out from this office. And I know I have already done that once." 

Haroche leaned forward. "If that's what's really concerning you, I can propose a solution, to set your mind at ease. You can set this office's outgoings to go through my console for the time being. If there is anything unusual, I will catch it straight away and then we can deal with it. But I can't imagine there will be." He smiled, confident. 

"You'll look anyway," Illyan retorted, and Haroche's smile broadened. 

"Of course, sir. I assume nothing." 

Illyan ran a hand over his face. "Very well, General. I'll trust your recommendations for this. I'll clock off after the evening round-up, and assess again in the morning. You--you can keep an eye on me. If I know you've got my back, this will all be much easier to deal with." 

Haroche's shoulders relaxed a fraction. "I will. But it'll be fine, sir, you'll see." 

Once Haroche had left, Illyan set up the diversion on his comconsole, then yawned again, stepped back and leaned against the bare wall, and wondered whether Alys would have given him the same advice.


End file.
